


I Throw My Armour Down

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Take Me To The Stars [13]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Grief/Mourning, Hopeful Ending, Post-Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 08:33:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18049160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Looking for answers about her oldest friend, the Doctor returns to the place where everything changed. She's prepared for many things, and yet Clara's reaction still breaks her heart.





	I Throw My Armour Down

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sat in my fics folder for months because I assumed I'd queued it. I HAD NOT. Go me. Anyway, here it is now to make up for it.

It’s strange, being back here on the ship where everything changed. Her body doesn’t like it – every cell and atom and fibre of her being is calling out at her to run; to flee this place where the tepid stench of death has settled heavily over the scarred earth, and where corpses of Cybermen are strewn amongst the charred stumps of tree and craters of sedimentary water. Even without knowing that her own fate is to inextricably tied to the battleground, there are enough uncomfortable reminders of other wars and other battles to make her throat close up, and she’s grateful for Clara’s presence at her side, and her hand in her own.

“This is very much similar,” she begins, because as long as she’s talking she’s not thinking that each Cyber-corpse was once a human being, corrupted by the Master’s absolute lust for power. “To the place where I first saw you again.” 

Clara’s brow furrows a little as she looks around at the mud and the death and the destruction, and the Doctor can all but sense her brain whirring away in search of the correct tone to strike when she makes her reply. Will it be sarcasm? Chastisement? Warmth? 

“Not-me,” she reminds the Doctor gently, and the Time Lady is grateful for the softness of her voice. Sarcasm might be Clara’s default, comforting and familiar, but it would be jarring here and now. “Testimony-me.” 

“The version of you that brought you back to me,” the Doctor murmurs, squeezing her partner’s hand tightly and drawing her closer to her. She knows she should be being brave, but there’s something wholly disquieting about this place and so she capitulates to her craving for physical reassurance. “Sorry.” 

“For what?”

“Clinging to you like this.”

“I don’t blame you,” Clara reassures her, keeping their fingers intertwined. “I really don’t. This place is…” 

“Frightening,” the Doctor finishes for her, unable to find a more eloquent adjective but hardly caring. “Wrong.”

Clara nods in agreement and they ascend a low ridge in silence before the Doctor stops dead, her entire body screaming as she doubles over in crippling pain. Her head is pounding and her body feels as though it’s on fire, and it’s all she can take not to voice her pain aloud, biting down on her tongue instead until she tastes iron. She knows where she is and what it symbolises, and it’s almost more than she can take. 

“Doctor?!” Clara’s voice sounds distant and strange, as though far away, and the Doctor squeezes her eyes shut, sinking to her haunches and wrapping her arms around herself as she fights for breath. She knows this pain. She knows what it means, and what it signifies, but it doesn’t make it any less terrifying as it consumes her. “Doctor, what’s wrong? What’s happening?”

Up ahead, she knows what awaits them, and it’s almost too horrifying to voice aloud. Were she human, she might be hyperventilating and vomiting into the mud now – as it is, she only clutches her head, trying to ignore the swirling agony that comes from crossing her own timestream at such a crucial point as her own previous regeneration. 

“Doctor?” Clara says again, then her voice trails away as she looks over to where they had been heading. The Doctor doesn’t need to say anything – her partner knows. Clara always knows. Perhaps it’s the lingering effects of what happened on Trenzalore, or perhaps simply familiarity gleaned through love and proximity, but somehow she always knows. 

“This is where…” Clara’s voice sounds even more distant now, and the Doctor realises that she’s stepped away; that she’s descending the ridge’s gentle slope towards where it happened. There’s a soft, dull thud, and then: “Oh.” 

The Doctor opens her eyes and looks down the incline to where Clara is kneeling in the mud, her head bowed. She feels both of her hearts break as she realises the selfishness in assuming that she would be the only one to suffer by visiting the last resting place of her previous self; as she realises that for Clara, this spot is a double-edged sword – it’s a shrine, and yet simultaneously a torture chamber. Through gritted teeth, she watches as Clara places a hand against the soil, letting her hair fall over her face as she murmurs soft words that the Doctor can’t – and doesn’t want – to catch; words that are not for her, but for the man who Clara lost all those years before. 

“Did it…” Clara seems to sense the Doctor’s eyes on her, and looks up. Her cheeks are wet with tears, and for once she seems unabashed and unashamed by this, even as she bites her lip to keep it from trembling. “Did it hurt?”

The Doctor knows at once what she means, and her mind flicks back to the agony of being struck by the Cybermen’s weapons, feeling her sense of self beginning to slip away with each hit. There had been fire, and earth, and mud, and the crackling air that was full of electricity and hatred, and then there had been blissful unconsciousness as her mind carried her away from the broken physical shell that lay upon the cold, churned-up ground. 

“No,” she lies, not wanting her partner to know the true horrors of what happened here. “No, it didn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Clara’s voice is hard and unwavering. “Did it hurt? Did he – did _you_ – suffer?” 

The Doctor remembers feeling her clothes be torn to ribbons against her skin, the fabric singeing her as it burned away. She remembers hitting the ground, time and time again, the air leaving her lungs as she did so, and she remembers feeling the snap of bone as she was flung skywards and then earthwards for the last time. She remembers how a final tear had slipped from her eyes as she lamented the lack of stars, burning like acid as it slipped across her cheek and disappeared into the warm embrace of the earth. There had been a sudden, warm awareness of the irony of it all – dying alone on a spaceship made to resemble the planet she so adored, under a simulated sky unadorned with as much as the trappings of the cosmos she had dedicated her life to, and then… there had been nothing. 

“Yes,” she murmurs reluctantly. “Yes, I did.”

Clara looks down at the earth, and with shaking fingers she begins to gouge at the soil. The Doctor doesn’t understand at first, until she forces herself to rise to her feet and descend the small ridge, squinting in the semi-darkness as she draws closer. 

 _Here lay the Doctor. A good man._  

Clara stands, her nails and fingers caked with dirt, and hugs the Doctor fiercely, clinging to her with the kind of bone-crushing intensity that serves as a beautiful counterpoint to the metaphysical discomfort the Doctor had been consumed by minutes earlier. 

“I’m sorry,” Clara whispers, and the Doctor feels the echoes of her tears, cold and wet, against her skin. “That it had to be like that, for you.” 

“It’s…” 

“And I’m sorry for crying, but I miss him. I know I have you, but I miss him.” 

“I know.” 

“I miss both of you; both of the ones that I knew. And the others, I suppose, but mainly… but mainly the two of you I knew properly.”

“I know, Clara.” 

“I love you,” she finishes, nuzzling her face into the Doctor’s neck. “All of you, of course I do. But sometimes I really do miss them.”

“I know, Clara, and that’s alright,” the Doctor slips her arms around her partner, holding her tightly as Clara dissolves into fresh tears. She knows this pain, and this conflict. She’s witnessed it before – friends who have struggled to reconcile their grief and their elation; the joy of knowing she lives, but the loss of the person she was. She isn’t angry at Clara; far from it, she feels only a rush of self-loathing for allowing her previous self to meet such a fickle end for humans he hardly knew, and to do so without so much as a thought for the woman he was leaving behind. 

“I’m glad,” Clara manages after a moment, her words muffled by the Doctor’s coat. “I’m glad that Bill and Heather took you back to the TARDIS. If you’d… if you’d not changed… if this had been it… I don’t think I could stand to know that it was here, and that you were alone.” 

“I think the TARDIS would have died with me,” the Doctor confesses in a tremulous voice. “I don’t think she’d have withstood the grief, or known precisely what she could do without a Time Lord to pilot her.”

“She could have been free. Or found me. Let me commemorate you, somehow.”

“With what? A plaque in the Black Archive? A monument in Trafalgar Square? We both know that wouldn’t happen, Clara. It wouldn’t be practical to have my death telegraphed, for a start, or to have a final resting place. Entire races would kill for my body.” 

“In my own way, I would have found a way,” Clara says quietly, her voice low and fierce. “I would have made sure that you were honoured. And that promise stands – if you ever dare to leave me, or if you ever fall prey to this kind of heroism again, I will honour you. Until the end of time, I will honour you.” 

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I love you,” she reminds the Doctor with a weary smile. “And that doesn’t just stop, and that doesn’t just pass unnoticed by the universe.”

“I don’t deserve you,” the Doctor rests her palm against Clara’s cheek and watching her companion’s eyes flutter closed in response to the contact. “I truly don’t.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but I’m exactly what you deserve,” Clara turns her head and kisses her palm, tender and loving, and then pulls away, lifting her own muddied hand and placing it in the Doctor’s. “But we aren’t here to be sad, Doctor. We’re here for… well, other reasons.” 

“Yes,” the Doctor murmurs, giving Clara’s hand a grateful squeeze. “I know. Just. Thank you for loving me. And thank you, for accepting me loving you.”

Clara flashes a smile at her, the most rapid of expressions, but it’s enough for the Doctor to glean courage from. The Time Lady takes a deep breath and jerks into motion, Clara following along beside her in companionable silence as they trudge across the battlefield with renewed determination. 

The Doctor can already tell, even as they approach the site, what they are going to find. She sees the overgrown silver frames of the lift doors, and from there she tracks her eyes left, to the spot that the TARDIS informed her was where her oldest friend had fallen.

There’s nothing there. There’s the outline on the soil, faded to grey and almost unnoticeable, of a woman – laser burns, she supposes. There’s plants growing across the space now, ivy and weeds that she could name, if she chose, but she doesn’t. 

“So, she’s…”

“Definitely not there,” the Doctor says thoughtfully, feeling a rush of muted elation and fear. “As I suspected.”

“And that’s…” Clara looks at her warily, the memory of their last encounter with Missy etched into both of their minds. “What?” 

“Good, I suppose,” the Doctor shrugs, keeping her expression noncommittal. “I’m not alone.”

Clara doesn’t take offence, doesn’t remind her that she wasn’t alone before. Instead, she leans down and twists the ivy across the outline in a more natural way, covering the crime-scene-esque figure. 

“No,” Clara murmurs, looking over at her with a thoughtful smile. “No, you’re not.”


End file.
